The defining masterpiece of modern manga—the series that "God of Manga" Osamu Tezuka considered his life's work—is finally available in English once again, in a beautiful, cloth-bound hardcover featuring fully restored art and new introductions by translator and author Fredrik L. Schodt (Manga! Manga!) and Hugo finalist Dr. Ada Palmer (Too Like the Lightning).
Vol. 1 includes the first two stories in publication order—"Dawn" and "Future"—presented in a large size with silkscreen-printed and gold foil–stamped covers and including color pages recovered from the original serialization and other material never before presented in any English edition: 670 pages of manga and bonus material.From the premiere of
Astro Boy on television in 1963 to the release of
Buddha, Princess Knight,
Dororo,
Black Jack, and many other English editions of manga in the 21st century, Americans have become familiar with the vast breadth of Osamu Tezuka's stunning career, over which he produced more than 150,000 pages of comics.
Yet the most conspicuous omission from Tezuka's English catalog has long been the series he considered his magnum opus, one he worked on and reworked from the 1950s until his death in 1989:
Phoenix. Known as
Hi no tori ("firebird") in Japanese, this meta-series—inspired by Tezuka's omnivorous appetite for Asian folklore, American science fiction, Russian ballet and animation, and anything he he found fascinating from around the world—leaps through extremes of time and space, encompassing exciting action and experimental suspense, stark philosophy and intimate drama.
Tying it all together are the recurring "actors" of Tezuka's "Star System"; themes of mortality, legacy, love, and ego; and the titular bird herself: at times a mythical being living in a volcano, at others a spiritual presence in deep space, always a mystery.
This new Kodansha edition features the acclaimed original translation, commissioned during Tezuka's lifetime by his production company, from Dadakai—a collective consisting of Jared Cook, Shinji Sakamoto, and Frederik L. Schodt—for which they were made the inaugural inductees of the American Manga Awards Hall of Fame. This translation was previously published by Viz Media from 2002–2008 but is long out of print, and Schodt and Cook themselves have returned to assist in updating it for this edition.
The art draws on a new restoration published in Japan in 2020, intended to replicate the visuals of Phoenix precisely as it would have appeared to Japanese readers experiencing it for the first time in
COM, Tezuka's
seinen manga magazine. This edition features recreations of two–, three–, and four-color art treatments that were forgotten for decades, with chapter title pages and new lettering never seen before, wrapped in a cloth cover with screenprinted and foil-stamped trade dress.
The manga can be broken up into "seasons," each of which made up one complete story, and which will be published in order of publication in Japan. This first volume contains:
- I. Dawn: Drawing on the most ancient Japanese myths and chronicles, "Dawn" tells the story of a medicine man who washes up on an unfamiliar shore, where a warrior has just been killed seeking the living blood of the Phoenix to cure his wife, who is deathly ill. On threat of death, the outsider manages to nurse the widow back to health, but his motives are not pure, and the greed of Japan's first queen will soon rain chaos down upon the homeland of the Phoenix… Serialized from January–November 1967. Afterword by Haruji Mori. New introduction by translator Frederik L. Schodt.
- II. Future: Leaping from the mythical dawn of the Japanese state to the twilight of humanity, "Future" (also known as "A Tale of the Future") pits the love of a lone space patrolman against the crushing power of a totalitarian, machine-run society. In the year 3404, Masato lives in the computerized megalopolis Yamato, where he must keep the woman he loves—Tamami—hidden. Tamami is a "moopie," an alien species capable of affecting human perception, for which they have been banned and ruthlessly exterminated. When Masato's superior Rock Holmes, a ruthless and ambitious man obsessed with arresting the slide of human culture into decadence, discovers Masato's secret, he will stop at nothing to finish the moopie genocide—even if it means chasing the couple across the galaxy. Afterword by the author. New introduction by Dr. Ada Palmer (the "Terra Ignota" series, Inventing the Renaissance).
